What is it with savory snacks and the Counter-Cultural Community? Well, if you don’t know, no-one’s going to tell you. In fact, no-one could tell you. As George Orwell put it in another context:

Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a Times leading article as Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc. The shortest rendering that one could make of this in Oldspeak would be: “Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.” But this is not an adequate translation. To begin with, in order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted above, one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by Ingsoc. And in addition, only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the full force of the word bellyfeel, which implied a blind, enthusiastic acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word oldthink, which was inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence. (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Appendix)

As Will Self might have put it: Normthinkers unbellyfeel crispcrunch. But “wickedness and decadence” are (of course) precisely what he wants to promote in this ferally phantasmagoric book. If you think that a glass of wine and some cranked-up Throbbing Gristle or Sunn O))) are a suitable accompaniment to your transgressive textualizing, I’m afraid you’re sadly out of touch. Mavericks munch, matey.

Which means you don’t want music getting in the way of your commitment to crunch. But flavour matters passionately too, of course. There are no hard-and-fast rules – this is the Counter Culture – but no-one with a culturally sensitive palate would think of combining Soft Machine with salt’n’vinegar crisps or Last Exit to Brooklyn with cheesy wotsits.

So what should you combine them with? That’s up to you and your counter-cultural conscience, but Self closes the book with his own suggestions for a full year’s worth of “Sinisterly Savory Snacks” to “Reinforce Your Rhizomatically Radical Reading”. His hierarchy of hot’n’spicy heresy includes Les Chants de Maldoror (Chilli Heatwave Doritos), Cities of the Red Night (Pickled Onion Discos), The Ticket That Exploded (Beef Hula Hoops), American Psycho (Barbecue Pringles), Junkie (Morrison’s Salt-and-Vingear Twists), 120 Days of Sodom (Scampi-and-Lemon Nik Naks) and The Satanic Verses (Paprika Walker’s Max).

I feel like releasing a satisfied (and strongly flavoured) belch just reading that list. But there’s one ringer amid the relentlessly radical recommendations – if you can spot it, you should definitely read this book. If you can’t, you should even-more-definitely read this book. Munch matters. As Self says in his incendiary introduction: “Commit to Counter Culture – Commit to Crunch.”

But even by the standards of these Mancunian mavericks, one book stands out for terminal teraticity: David Britton’s Basted in the Broth of Billions (2008). This septic slab of cerebral psychosis is infamous among the counter-cultural cognoscenti for three things above all others: its extremity, its complexity and its incomprehensibility. No two reviewers have ever agreed what’s going on, what Britton is trying to say and even (in certain passages) what language the book is written in.

Seven years on, that hermeneutic fluidity is incisively interrogated in Basteland: The Making of a Masterpiece. It’s a detailed study of Basted overseen by Dr David M. Mitchell, the Post-Polymath Professor of Pantology at Port Talbot University. Convening a toxic team of psychotropic Savoyonauts, Mitchell first baited them to a frenzy, then unleashed them on their subject. He edited the resultant essays and monographs before penning an incendiary introduction of his own.

The interpretations he oversees are, as you’d expect, as varied as the contributors. In the closely reasoned analysis “Strength through Savoy”, transgressive textualist Will Self describes Basted as:

[A] rhizomatically rancid assault on the most helioseismically hallowed corner-stones of the modernist canon, jump-starting the cataclysmically creaking Colossus of On the R(h)o(a)d(es) with an extremophilically eldritch injection of synapse-stewing swamp-soup scooped from the atrabiliously atrociousest anus of the most mephitic myrmidon of Mephistopheles, whilst tipping its panache-packed Panama slyly – and wryly – to that rawest and wrenchingest of gut-grenades in Burroughs’ underground oeuvre: 1955’s never-surpassed Bulgaria on a Budget. (“Strength through Savoy: Notes towards a Vernichtungsliteratur of the Apocalypse”, pg. 46)

Sample pages #1

Elsewhere, veteran Savoyologist Polly Toynbee applies the techniques of the Kabbalah to unearth what she alleges to be a pastiche of Enid Blyton’s Five Go to Billycock Hill (1957) in chapters six, eight and nine of Basted, while committed counter-culturalist David Kerekes of Headpress Journal unfolds an intriguing theory about a core motif of Basted:

For countless readers, one of the edgiest and unsettlingest aspects of the book’s full-throttle aesthetic onslaught has to be the way in which, following each stomach-churningly detailed episode of brain-splattering, bowel-strewing slaughter, Lord Horror is inevitably described or depicted as opening and eating a packet of salt’n’vinegar crisps. He then often blows into the empty bag and bursts it. But why? In this essay I hope to explore this question and come up with some (tentative) conclusions as to the symbolism that is at work. (“Our Bite Macht Frei: The Symbolism of Salt-and-Vinegar Crisps in Britton’s Burroughsian Bildungsroman Basted in the Broth of Billions”, pg. 368)

Sample pages #2

Kerekes concludes that the crisp-eating episodes are, inter alia, allegories of the Stations of the Cross. He makes an excellent case, but who knows? Bastedin the Broth of Billions defies both description and definition. Basteland: The Making of a Masterpiece will defy something else: your eyes. It’s the first book published by Savoy in what (to the exoteric observer) will appear to be entirely black type on entirely black paper. I’m not going to say how you can read the text, but I’ll give one hint: what Savoy do to English literature, this book does to the electro-magnetic spectrum…
Previously pre-posted on Papyrocentric Performativity:

• Bulg’ Boy Boogie — Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, Ted Morgan (1991)